A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

UNPRECEDENTED CONSERVATIVE BACKING FOR MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 28, 2014, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“UNPRECEDENTED CONSERVATIVE BACKING FOR
MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE”

From the moment Franklin D. Roosevelt
proposed America’s first minimum wage law in 1938 (25 cents per hour, or $11 a
week), conservatives have fought increases every time and everywhere they’ve
been proposed.

It would cost millions of jobs,
industrialists and business interests argue every time anyone tries to boost
the minimum. Meanwhile, executive salaries have skyrocketed, leaving many
millions of workers far behind in a phenomenon now called “income inequality.”

But now comes Ron Unz, former
publisher of the American Conservative magazine and once a Republican candidate
for governor, backing a new minimum wage for California two bucks an hour above
the $10 minimum now set to take effect two years from now. Unz is not to be
taken lightly; he authored and largely funded the 1998 Proposition 227 ban on
most bilingual education programs.

Far from the Republican bugaboo it
long has been, software entrepreneur Unz claims a higher minimum wage will
solve many pet GOP peeves and could restore his party’s faded fortunes in the
state. He is once again pushing an initiative, this time aiming to raise the
minimum to $12 an hour immediately.

But Unz doesn’t plan to fund the
campaign for this one alone, and contributions from others have been slow
coming. So it might not reach the ballot until 2016.

If you’re a conservative and you don’t
like illegal immigration, Medicaid, food stamps and other welfare programs, you
might be disappointed by that kind of wait. For Unz makes a good case for his
claim that the best way to cut back on all those longtime GOP targets is to
eliminate the need for them by paying workers more.

“I first got involved with this when I
realized that a higher minimum wage solves the illegal immigration problem. The
vast majority of illegals are in this country for jobs, jobs Americans won’t
do,” Unz says. He claims it’s not the nature of work in car washes, hotels,
restaurant kitchens and vegetable fields that turns off American workers – it’s
the lousy pay for that work.

“Americans won’t do those jobs because
the wages are so low you can’t survive,” he says. “Now Los Angeles is talking
about raising the minimum for hotel workers there to $15. When you raise the
wages to a level like that, a lot of people are suddenly happy in jobs they
wouldn’t touch before.”

If U.S. citizens take those jobs once
they pay significantly better than welfare, a lot of the illegal immigration
problem will go away. The same for programs like food stamps and Medi-Cal, Unz
claims.

President Obama’s effort to up the
federal minimum to $10.10 gets firm resistance from Republicans in Congress
voicing the same old arguments. Fighting Obama’s plan, Republicans pounced on a
February report from the Congressional Budget Office saying it could cost about
500,000 jobs nationally.

Unz argues that number is misleading.
Initial job losses, he claims, would be followed by job increases stemming from
the roughly $150 billion a year the higher minimum would put into the economy.
California Assembly Speaker John Perez, a Democrat, made the same argument last
year while backing the scheduled 2016 increase. “Putting that kind of money
into the economy will create far more jobs than it might cost,” Perez said.

And, Unz said in an interview, the
report to Congress found that 27 million people – about 98 percent of those affected
– would benefit, while just 2 percent might not. “If a policy helps 98 percent
of the people affected, it usually looks pretty good,” Unz deadpanned.

Plus, he figures, when minimum wage
earners get more money of their own and need less welfare spending, the
government will save as much as $250 billion a year which could be used for
anything and might beef up the economy.

So far, Unz has won backing from
prominent conservatives like Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly and talk show
host Bill O’Reilly. But elected politicians on the right are staying away from
his putative proposition and those on the left are silent, perhaps because Unz
would considerably outdo the plan they passed last year.

Whenever this plan reaches the ballot,
Democrats will be in the odd position of either backing a Republican’s plan
that makes them look like pikers, or opposing their own ideas.

-30-

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His
book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and
the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

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About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.